Adam Driver explains the “rare and precious thing” about being an actor
Most actors can only dream of having a career like Adam Driver’s. From Lena Dunham’s love interest on Girls to angsty Star Wars baddie Kylo Ren to his devastating performance in Marriage Story, Driver has done it all and now finds himself in rarified air as a screen performer. Plus, he founded a charity that offers free arts programmes to the families of military veterans. It would seem he isn’t just talented but a sickeningly nice guy too.
In recent years, Driver has taken to portraying real life figures with Italian accents. He played Maurizio Gucci, head of the namesake fashion empire in House of Gucci, which sadly turned out to be a bit of a joke (putting it lightly). He managed to bounce back a couple of years later with Ferrari, where he played Enzo Ferrari, the man behind the iconic red cars.
Whilst promoting the movie, Driver spoke to Scraps from the Loft and divulged one of his favourite parts of his profession. “The rare and precious thing about being an actor is this ignition of empathy for a stranger,” he said. “You spend months in a different country, work 14 hours a day and your body inevitably adjusts to the new time you find yourself immersed in, you become your character by force and then go back and this metamorphosis is also annulled. For me, this is cinema, this disconnect.”
The star went on to talk about the many different stories that movies can tell, and how this principle has been a big force in his career. “It’s Jaws and it’s Mean Streets,” he concluded. “I’m interested in variety more than anything else, after all as a teenager I constantly rented independent films from video stores.”
Ferrari was a real passion project for director Michael Mann, one that took over 20 years to get made. Mann, who was also present for the interview, shared his views on what cinema should be. “What interests me about cinema is drama, and crisis as its essential element.” He compared the life of Enzo Ferrari to another great Italian export, opera, claiming that the “high melodrama” of the art form “perfectly melds with Ferrari’s life which unfolded on this tragic note, on this terrible joy.”
Despite this very poetic description, audiences were not compelled to come out and see the film. Ferrari grossed just $43.3million on a budget of over double that, and whilst critics were quick to praise it, Mann’s efforts garnered him no major awards. Talk about a tragic note.
Driver seemed to enjoy helping an acclaimed director complete a long-gestating idea, as he’s also part of Megalopolis, the decades-overdue picture from Francis Ford Coppola. The sci-fi epic, which stars Driver as an architect in an alternate version of Earth, has famously been financed by $120million of Coppola’s own money. It’s also been a very controversial, with the Apocalypse Now guru being forced to defend his casting of Shia LeBoeuf and to address allegations of his own inappropriate on-set behaviour.
